Government Operations Committee on Feb. 1st, 2018

[André Leduc]

I haven't seen it. That doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.

[Andy Akrouche]

Actually, the federal government—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

No, I mean in the private sector. Have you seen that?

[Andy Akrouche]

Usually in the private sector what I've seen is 12 months' revenue.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

I just want to get back to what you were talking about.

I think, Mr. French, you talked about copy and paste in the RFP. They copy and paste. Is that just again protecting ourselves? Is it laziness? Is it that this is our standard that we have to use?

Just to follow up, Mr. Akrouche, you talked about having to find a company with international experience. Again, is it the same kind of reason? Is this just because we've always done it this way and we don't know anything else?

[Nevin French]

Part of that copy and paste is just the speed of getting it done. As Andy mentioned earlier, at times with procurement, certainly from what I've seen, if you know who you want and they have the experience and you just want to go ahead and do something, and yet you're still required to go through a certain process, it will delay things. I believe you mentioned sole-sourcing earlier.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

I was going to say that it's pretty clear they don't need to go that way, because they just go and sole-source and come up with a reason.

[Nevin French]

You kind of have the worst of both worlds there, because you'll end up.... In my experience, you go with a sole source if you have the exact perfect person. It will be under a certain amount, and you can just go ahead and do it, often for speed and efficiency and under the pressure to just get it done.

Then you have situations in which it has the appearance of an open general bid process, but as seen on the slide earlier, 90% of the time it's already landed with someone. There you've gone through this epic process and ended up with the winning bid that people could have predicted earlier. You have all the worst of that happening.

[André Leduc]

I've laughed a couple of times because.... We talk about references. I'm waiting for the first government contract to come out that says we need an artificial intelligence platform developer or application developer with 15 or 20 years' experience. We joke around when we have meetings in the office, and we kind of joked about this. The problem with what's going on is the government is also the largest contractor of professional services and consultants, and they constantly ask for 15 or 20 years' of experience.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Let me interrupt quickly. Is that again because that's what we've always done?

[André Leduc]

You want the best. You're the biggest. You're the government and you want the best possible talent to come in and do this work for you, but there are implications further downstream. There are graduates coming out of Ottawa U., Carleton U., and Algonquin. They can never get work because they never have that experience, so where do they go? They go to Montreal or Toronto to garner that experience. What we're going to end up with is a bit of a vacuum behind this crew that we have currently working, who are all age 45 and up. We don't have a lot of young IT consultants moving into the government because they're constantly asking for 15 or 20 years of experience.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Is there any valid length of experience that we should say, or is it just item by item? Again, as with AI, we can't be asking for 15, but sometimes it's valid, and we can't blank it out.

[André Leduc]

What you want to be doing is calling—

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

It's unfortunate, but we're going to have to turn this over to Madam Mendès. She may want you to expand and complete your answer.

You have five minutes, Madam Mendès.

[Alexandra Mendes, Liberal, Brossard—Saint-Lambert, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you all for being here.

It's an interesting part of the question, but I do have another one, and I'm going to share my time with Mr. MacKinnon, if I may, Mr. Chair.

I sit on the public accounts committee too. I'm here with both hats. In public accounts, for the past two and half years we've heard constantly from the Auditor General about the outcomes we should be looking at when we do procurement. The most important outcome we have to look for is what we deliver to Canadian citizens. However, we're not looking at how we deliver services, how we deliver what a government is supposed to deliver.

In the context of IT, how would you see government changing the way we look at these outcomes for Canadian citizens? How do we go about opening up the procurement process to SMEs? I believe that would be one of the best ways to encourage the change we need. How do we improve and deliver on our commitment to Canadian citizens?

[Andy Akrouche]

From my experience, the critical factor in a successful initiative is managing the relationships among stakeholders. What we see, though, is misalignment between government departments in working towards these outcomes and in deciding what the expectations are. It's not about the ability of the vendors to do specific work or use their capabilities in their project. Rather, it's about coordination and alignment between the public sector parties, and later, alignment between the public sector and the private sector parties.

We can talk about being outcome-based and all this other stuff, but unless we have better models for working together within the government, with industry, and with that selected partner, we can't put together successful projects. Most of the time, when we hire vendors, as soon as they come in, they walk into a firefight. They get confused because the internal government departments are not aligned on what they want or what the outcomes should be. In a lot of these cases, you get a year or two of inaction. You win a contract, but you end up with two years of inaction. Nothing happens.

[Alexandra Mendes, Liberal, Brossard—Saint-Lambert, QC]

I want to press on the—

[André Leduc]

I think the concept needs to be earlier engagement with industry. It's hard for me to set out a procurement to access an innovative product if I haven't engaged with the industry that delivers this innovative product.

Sometimes before the procurement process even starts, we've made a decision on what we're going to procure; that technology might already be outdated, and never mind the fact that it's going to take us three years before we start implementing the technology.

If you engage the industry earlier on, the industry will be able to say what it's doing today and what it will be able to provide in the next generation in the way of an application or solution.

[Alexandra Mendes, Liberal, Brossard—Saint-Lambert, QC]

Mr. Chair, I would like to give Mr. MacKinnon a chance.

[Steven MacKinnon, Liberal, Gatineau, QC]

This won't really be a question; it will just be some observations.

I want to thank Mr. Akrouche and ITAC. As Mr. Leduc acknowledged, we've had many an interesting conversation over the past little while. I've spent an enormous amount of time on IT modernization and procurement in Canada's public service. An awful lot of things occur to me. An awful a lot of things have to do with—and I say this in the most non-partisan way possible—the maturity of governments and oppositions and their ability to tolerate failure, including the ability of oppositions not to engage in “gotcha” tactics and the ability of governments to take calculated risks.

I am intrigued by the whole movement toward agile procurement. I know the government, as in many things, is several years behind in this. Still, I've had interesting conversations about some successes, not only in the IT community but also in the enterprise community. I don't know that it applies to every possible procurement, but I do know that it is a way to ensure that we have the best and the brightest working on specific segments of issues. I also know that it's a way to get more SMEs and more innovators involved in the process.

I now have to apologize for leaving you no time to comment on this. If in a further segment you wish to take this up, you're more than welcome to. I'll finish how I started. It's an ongoing dialogue, and this is a very important subject for this committee to be considering.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you, Mr. MacKinnon.

We'll go to Mr. Masse for three minutes, please.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

One of the interesting aspects about the planning notation you have is the idea of this ongoing commitment—I guess almost similar to the network that you've proposed—of regular services to engage the SMEs and make that investment. That was the case for the auto sector for many years in Windsor and Essex County, where there were federal supports to help bring along the industry and to educate folks, especially when things changed. They didn't get just an email. There were workshops. There was activity.

There was preplanning done three years in advance so that it wasn't just seen as a gamble but as part of long-term business development, especially for tool and die and mould-making. In fact, some of the recovery we've had in that field over the last number of years has been outside of automotive, but it came with supports to transition to medical devices and other types of industries, with an engagement with the government.

Could something like that be done, or is there a pilot situation that can be done? I'll leave it at that.

[André Leduc]

Steven mentioned risk aversion, which I believe is probably at an all-time high in the bureaucracy. Nobody wants to be in the newspapers. You have all-time high risk aversion and a calling on the government to start experimenting and piloting.

If you want to help an SME, bring in that SME to run a pilot or an experiment or at least show you how the product works. There's a call, and there's an understanding. We have some of the right change agents in place throughout the bureaucracy who are calling on the government to start.

Run 10 small pilots. Seven of them might work and three of them might be complete catastrophes, but they're pilots and they're small. We're not going to implement this across government. Then you scale up. You think, “Okay, it worked well in this department, so we can run it in three or four other departments.”

You start piloting and experimenting. You're bringing them on. They're small contracts at first, because you're proofing them. You're getting them to test the product to see if it's going to function on that government framework. Then you can experiment with the SME. You get government collaborating with industry, saying “If we could only do this”, and then industry goes off and tries to make it happen.

The discussions are taking place. It's in its infancy, but it's really about.... I think we need to get away from “Take it or leave it; we're the government. We're an elephant; this is what we want, and this is how we want it” and get into more of this partnership, the conversation, negotiating the contracts, seeing what we can do by working together, and sharing risk.

It's a massive opportunity. If you want to have those socio-economic benefits, that's going to come with changing the manner in which we're doing business.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you very much.

Colleagues, we'll have time for two more interventions, I think, before we suspend.

We'll start with Mr. Jowhari, please, for seven minutes.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and I'd like to thank the witnesses.

I'd like to start with you, Mr. Leduc. You mentioned, as an ex-Big Five employee in Deloitte, some of the impediments around doing business with the government, and that most of the value propositions that we put on the table to be able to secure these contracts are now considered impediments for small businesses to be able to bid on these things.

You've also talked about a method of open procurement. You've talked about “agile”. You've talked about the pilot, which is a very interesting topic. What I want to know is this: which jurisdictions have been successful in transferring from the model we have to a model that's agile, a model that's pilot-based? What were the challenges they faced? How can we partner with an organization such as ITAC to facilitate that transition?